As a teen, Emirhan Gül was a keen gamer, so he was thrilled to join a gaming startup in Istanbul as a developer after university. Over five months, as Turkey rode the wave of mobile gaming, he worked on the design of 23 games, and soon experienced burnout.
“Budgets were high, there was a lot of work, and they hired anyone, even if they didn’t know much,” the 24-year-old told Rest of World. But “the idea of churning out a game a week didn’t really appeal to me much. It wasn’t a culture I particularly enjoyed.”
At the time, the mobile gaming industry was booming in Turkey. The country hosted more than 800 active game studios, making it the biggest game development hub in Europe after London. In 2021, more than half the top 10 mobile games on Apple’s App Store were developed by Turkish studios, including Peak, the country’s first unicorn. In 2022, Dream Games, Peak’s rival, became the second unicorn.
These success stories led aspiring developers like Gül to study gaming and enter the industry. After leaving the Turkish startup, Gül turned down an offer from a U.S. firm, and founded his own studio. With Claude Code’s launch in early 2025, Gül realized he needed just two full-time employees, a fraction of the nearly dozen workers in his previous job.
